Leading Innovation Summit 2026

Pre-Conference Workshop - 25th March

09:00 INNOVATION FOR GROWTH MASTERCLASS

If growth is the outcome, transformation is the process, and strategy is the methodology... Where does innovation come into play?

In the mindset and approaches that unlock differentiated strategies, effective transformations, and sustainable growth. Leading innovation means successfully accelerating the rate at which your company (i.e. your people) can:

- productively absorb, respond, and anticipate changes in the operational environment,
- generate, test, and validate hypotheses for internal and external value creation in light of those changes, and
- continue to achieve the financial results needed to sustain future operations.

This one-day masterclass will explore innovation as a customer-centric, creative, and experimentation-driven approach to transformation and growth. This course will enhance your skills in driving a culture of innovation and apply the process to real world business and organisational challenges.

Key Learning Outcomes

• Reposition innovation as a key growth engine for business model sustainability.
• Align innovation, business model design, and experimentation to your organisation’s success.
• Amplify a cultural environment conducive to innovation.
• Apply creative thinking to generate and lead new solutions
• Identify winning ideas and implement them effectively
• Prototyping to think and learn fast and test prototypes with customers
• Develop structured approach and skills to build and run experiments
• Make decisions and operate efficiently in chaos with insufficient data

Summit Day 1 - 25th March

08:45 Opening remarks from the Chair

9:00 AM: Welcome to Country

SESSION 1: HUMAN-CENTERED LEADERSHIP 9:10 AM: Leading with Empathy and Authenticity in an AI-Driven World

As technology accelerates, human connection becomes the most powerful differentiator. This session explores how leaders can use emotional intelligence, empathy, and authenticity to build trust, strengthen culture, and inspire performance in the age of AI.

10:00 AM:  IT’S TIME.....FOR NETWORKING!

10:30 AM: MORNING TEA

SESSION 2: FUTURE OF WORK AND LEADERSHIP 10:50 AM: International Keynote: Redefining Leadership for an AI-Enabled Workforce

The future of work demands more than technical expertise. Leaders must inspire adaptability, guide teams through change, and cultivate resilience as AI transforms roles and responsibilities. This session explores how to equip people with the mindset, skills, and confidence to thrive in an enabled environment.

SESSION 3: FUTURE FRONTIERS KEYNOTE 11:50 AM: Redefining Leadership for an AI-Enabled Workforce

Recent years have shown just how exposed organisations are to disruption. Cyber incidents, supply chain shocks, extreme weather and geopolitical instability have turned resilience from a technical concern into a leadership imperative. In this session, Damian Beltrami, Chief Information Officer at Toll Group, shares how a global logistics organisation is strengthening its digital foundations to operate through constant uncertainty. He explores how Toll is prioritising reliability, security and continuity while still modernising legacy systems and enabling innovation. Damian will unpack what leaders need to focus on when resilience matters more than speed alone. From reducing single points of failure to making smarter technology trade offs, this session offers practical insight into building systems and teams that can absorb disruption, recover quickly, and keep critical operations moving.

12:40 PM: LUNCH

SESSION 4: CASE STUDY 1:40 PM: Putting People First in Digital Transformation

Technology alone cannot deliver transformation. This session showcases a leading organisation that successfully kept people at the heart of their AI journey. Learn how they balanced innovation with human impact, overcame fear, and built a culture where employees became champions of change

SESSION 5: EXCLUSIVE KEYNOTE 2:10 PM: Driving the Human Edge in an AI Future

In this powerful keynote, Victor Dominello shares how human leadership, trust, and culture can shape innovation in an age defined by AI. Drawing on his transformation of Service NSW into a globally recognised model for citizen-centric digital delivery, Victor explores how organisations can balance automation with empathy, ethics, and inclusion to build services that genuinely serve people. Attendees will gain an inside view of what it takes to lead in regulated, high-impact environments where technology is moving faster than policy. Victor reveals practical lessons on fostering trust in digital systems, empowering teams to innovate responsibly, and redefining leadership for a future where human capability remains the ultimate advantage.

3:30 PM: AFTERNOON TEA

SESSION 6: CLOSING KEYNOTE 4:00 PM: Simplifying at Speed. Building Safer Systems That Scale

As digital transformation accelerates, risk does not sit on the sidelines. Fraud, scams, identity protection and operational resilience are now central to how organisations earn and keep trust. At the same time, complexity inside technology teams can slow decision making and dilute accountability. In this session, Kavita Mistry shares how AMP is simplifying its technology operating model to move faster while strengthening protection for customers. She explores how fraud and security capabilities are being embedded into core platforms, not bolted on, and why simplification is critical to scaling safely in a highly regulated environment. Kavita will unpack what transformation leadership looks like when the stakes are high. From redesigning teams and governance to enabling faster decisions without increasing risk, this session offers practical insight into how leaders can build systems that are simpler, safer and ready to scale.

4:40 PM: CLOSE OF CONFERENCE

Summit Day 2 - 26th March

9:00 AM: Opening remarks from the Chair

SESSION 1 9:10 AM:  Innovation With Trust. Leading Digital Change in the NFP Sector

Fundraising is being reshaped by digital capability, data intelligence and rising expectations around privacy and trust. For not for profit organisations, the challenge is even sharper. How do you innovate fast while protecting the people and communities you exist to serve? In this session, Louise Baxter, CEO of Starlight Children’s Foundation, shares how Starlight is staying ahead of the curve by embedding digital and data leadership at the highest level. She will explore why Starlight became the first charity to establish a Digital and Data Advisory Board, chaired by a global technology leader, and what this has meant for governance, decision making and confidence in innovation. Louise will unpack how purpose driven organisations can use data responsibly, embrace digital transformation without losing trust, and build the internal capability needed to fundraise sustainably in a rapidly changing environment. This session offers powerful lessons for leaders across all sectors on balancing innovation, ethics and impact.

10:00 AM: MORNING TEA

SESSION 2: LEADERSHIP IN TRANSITION 10:50 AM: : Redefining Leadership for the AI-Enabled Workforce

The future of work demands more than technical expertise. Leaders must inspire adaptability, guide teams through change, and cultivate resilience as AI transforms roles and responsibilities. This session explores how to equip people with the mindset, skills, and confidence to thrive in an AIenabled environment.

SESSION 3 11:50 AM: Augmenting Human Intelligence: Leading in an AI-Powered Age

In this keynote Dr Thompson will draw on decades of research into gifted human intelligence and his leading work in large-language-models to explore how leaders can harness the partnership between human capability and advanced AI. He will examine how organisations must evolve culture, skills and leadership to ensure machines amplify human insight rather than replace it. Attendees will learn how to anchor innovation in human strengths—creativity, judgement, empathy—while building responsible AI systems. Dr Thompson will provide practical frameworks for embedding trust, ethics and human-centred design into AI-enabled operations so that teams stay ahead in a future where the human edge remains the ultimate differentiator.

12:40 PM: LUNCH

SESSION 4: CASE STUDY — PEOPLE-FIRST TRANSFORMATION 1:40 PM: Making Innovation Stick. Bringing People With You

In this session, Gary Dring moves the conversation beyond shiny tools and platforms to the real work of transformation. Getting people confident, involved and willing to try something new. Drawing on Ventia’s experience, Gary shares how initiatives like the Pizza and Pitch innovation program and the launch of Polli, a generative AI tool that gives teams fast access to policy and standards, helped shift culture from the ground up. He explores how leaders can create space for grassroots ideas, build trust in new technology, and co design solutions with the people who use them every day. This session shows how innovation delivers its greatest value when people feel included, capable and supported, not just when systems go live

3:30 PM: AFTERNOON TEA

SESSION 5: PANEL DISCUSSION — THE HUMAN EDGE IN ACTION 2:10 PM: When Failure Is Not an Option. Leading Digital Transformation

Digital transformation in healthcare is not about convenience or efficiency alone. It is about safety, trust, and outcomes where mistakes can have real human consequences. In this session, Alastair Sharman shares what it takes to lead large scale digital transformation inside a complex healthcare system. Drawing on Mater’s journey, he explores how leaders balance innovation with reliability, manage risk without paralysing progress, and deliver change while keeping clinicians and patients at the centre. This session offers powerful lessons for leaders across all industries on decision making, accountability, and leadership when the cost of getting it wrong is simply too high.

SESSION 6: EXCLUSIVE KEYNOTE 3:50 PM: Simplifying at Speed. Building Safer Systems That Scale

As digital transformation accelerates, risk does not sit on the sidelines. Fraud, scams, identity protection and operational resilience are now central to how organisations earn and keep trust. At the same time, complexity inside technology teams can slow decision making and dilute accountability. In this session, Kavita Mistry shares how AMP is simplifying its technology operating model to move faster while strengthening protection for customers. She explores how fraud and security capabilities are being embedded into core platforms, not bolted on, and why simplification is critical to scaling safely in a highly regulated environment. Kavita will unpack what transformation leadership looks like when the stakes are high. From redesigning teams and governance to enabling faster decisions without increasing risk, this session offers practical insight into how leaders can build systems that are simpler, safer and ready to scale.

4:40 PM: END OF CONFERENCE

Post-Conference Workshops - 28th March

09:30 UNLEASHING CREATIVITY IN YOUR TEAMS AND WORKSHOPS

Ideas are the currency of any customer experience, innovation, technology, people or transformation program, yet most organisations and teams aren’t purposely set up to encourage creativity to flourish. In fact, often the way they are set up has the opposite effect and unintentionally kills creativity.

The masterclass provides a deep dive into the key barriers to individual and team creativity and how to overcome them. Plus, how to design and facilitate the ideation phase and workshops,
generate breakthrough ideas, harvest ideas for potential and turn these into experimentation briefs. Participants get lots of opportunities to practice and receive plenty of feedback and coaching.
In this interactive and experiential workshop, Nathan Baird shares his 20+ years of practicing, refining, honing, leading and training creative thinking and ideation on 100s of design and innovation projects and 1000s of workshops across multiple industries and continents.

We’ll provide you a learn by doing experience of:

• A demystification of creativity, ideation and innovation and how they help organisations succeed
• An understanding of the barriers to individual and team creativity and how to overcome them
• How to think creatively to generate new solutions and lead this in others
• A practical tool-kit, mindset, language and framework for creative problem-solving
• An increased energy and confidence around creativity and ideation
• The ability and confidence to lead creative thinking in any situation
• Comprehensive understanding of the crucial elements of creative mastery: beliefs, behaviours, lateral thinking, state, and space
• How to pick the winners, harvest ideas for potential and craft experimentation briefs
• Lots of practice doing and facilitating ideation
• How to create the right environment to lead and practice creativity on an every day basis
• Fun, engaging and good networking!